Not sure what's up with the Crisscross Crash rating, as that was to me one of the best. I also really enjoyed Broken Tapa, Number Skeleton, Penta Chess (even if it was a monster), Liar Slitherlink, and GT Fillomino. Lots of incredible puzzles in this set.

I feel like I was significantly advantaged from having so many of my tests represented here. My Liar Slitherlink and Fillomino solves were around 5 minutes each, and looking at other submission histories in the results it looks like these three alone put me at least 10-15 minutes ahead of basically every other competitor. Feels like a strange form of compensation for putting in the work to write those two, but I'll take it.

Obviously my last 15 minutes went toward the Sea Battle. One problem I had is that I worked with the wrong set of rules for the first 9 minutes or so, forgetting the row/column constraint entirely and only remembering it when I finally guessed my way to "multiple solutions". But even if I hadn't done that, I think I would have needed close to 20 to wrap it up based on my experience with it after time.

I lost a lot of time by breaking both Crisscross Crash and Gapped Kakuro, and my 4x4 Diamonds and Worm Sudoku solves had me blind to simple things for awhile, but otherwise I felt like I was moving pretty quickly. Despite that, puzzles like Broken Tapa, Number Skeleton, and Penta Chess took me over 10 minutes, so there certainly were some monsters. Still, that's to be expected if it's 20 puzzles in 150 minutes.

I have no idea how I avoided having a disastrous solve--I started the test shortly after midnight (the only time I could find to participate), and was definitely feeling the effects of sleep deprivation by the end of the 2.5 hours. In particular, trying to mirror back and forth between the grids of the ESB Flip puzzle with an extremely tired brain was quite an interesting experience. :)

As the other commenters here so far have said, I enjoyed the Crisscross Crash (the next morning), as well as a number of the other puzzles. My favorite was the Penta Chess--I was very impressed by how much information was provided by each of the five pieces to give a solving path that was quite clear in retrospect.

Many thanks to Serkan, Deb, and everyone else who contributed to all the contests across 2011. I hope 2012 is as much fun.

This contest and the previous sudoku test was very nice retrospective of LMI Mocks and puzzle tests. I am here from the first days, I remember that I joined you on old Orkut Community. Thank you a lot for all great moments and everything what you doing for the puzzle world. Keep it up!

Nikola

Great contest, thanks Serkan.
My favourite moment was during the Greater-Than Fillomino - I was 75% finished and just extending the 8-region when the left-most end touched a <. Urgh! And that touched another <. Eek! I have to fit two even larger regions in and not much space left... but I managed ;) .

I think you were 'the first' international participant of our mock tests, going back to the times when we used 'e-mail submissions' :-)

Yes, good old days :)

Also, thanks to Deb and LMI for hosting the Serbian championships. This year we had some problems in our organization but I am glad that tradition is continued, even if the tests maybe wasn't so representative for national championship.

Nikola

I'd just like to add my thanks to Serkan and all at LMI for this enjoyable contest.

Regarding the Christmas period. I think that the length of this test will have prevented some from taking part over this holiday and I'm guessing that had there been a shorter contest - say maximum one hour, then more people may have taken part.

The length didn't help in planning at all, as I would have needed to block out 3-4 hours of time to do this right (read the instructions, test printing away from home, then actually take the test, then decompress/finish anything that wasn't done). But really the big problem, fixed for this year, was having Christmas on a Sunday making the weekend blocked out as Christmas Eve and Christmas are the big travel/family days of the holiday.

I probably should have asked Deb if I could play early, as I would have loved to compete in this test. Serkan's puzzles are always my favorite and "The Best of" theme was nice. But I'm glad to see two Americans in the top three and hope willwc has some more podiums in the future.